Kafka had a curious affinity for the incomplete. Yet, his fragments aren’t just literary leftovers; they give us a rare insight into the workings of his mind. One such fragment is “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande, PDF pp. 74-100), written between 1907 and 1909. Though left unfinished, this piece foreshadows the themes and narrative techniques characterising his future work.
The story follows the failed journey of Eduard Raban, a 30-year-old urbanite heading to the countryside to wed his fiancée, Betty, an “oldish pretty girl”. Raban, a name with two As, echoes that of Kafka—names starting with a K or containing two As are a hallmark of Kafka’s fictional alter egos. So this Raban fellow is about to embark on a journey, not to some exotic locale but to the countryside for his wedding. Yet, the title of the story ironically suggests that we are not moving towards a celebration but a non-wedding, a fiasco. Indeed, rather than bringing Raban happiness, the impending marriage provokes a series of anxieties, a weight that he feels obliged to bear. Raban appears to be looking for any excuse to postpone or disrupt the journey, telling himself that the two weeks of torment with Betty and her family will pass in any case. There is something almost prophetic about this scenario: while not entirely identical, Raban’s hesitations about marriage bear a strange resemblance to Franz Kafka’s own relationship with Felice Bauer, just a few years after he penned this tale: Kafka did indeed get cold feet after proposing to Felice, and his internal struggles about marriage culminated in the dissolution of their engagement following a confrontation in a hotel room.
What stands out in this fragment is how it prefigures many of Kafka’s recurring motifs and stylistic devices. Raban embodies the stifling anxiety that permeates Kafka’s works. The relentless rain that follows Raban from city to countryside, from one stage of his journey to the next, seems to be conspiring with his wish to sabotage his journey. As his anxiety mounts, he becomes consumed by a relentless stream of consciousness, preoccupied with petty concerns: the damp weather, the possibility of catching a cold, the fear of social awkwardness, “my room won’t be comfortable enough, it can’t be otherwise in the country […] the air in the country is often still very cool. Of course, I’ve taken precautions in my clothing, but I shall have to join with people who go for walks late in the evening.”1—oh, the horror, the horror of it all! These seemingly insignificant worries betray a more profound anxiety, possibly of a sexual nature, a pervasive sense of unease that permeates Raban’s existence, both in the external world and within the confines of his mind.
One notable feature of the text is Kafka’s use of shifting pronouns. Raban vacillates between addressing himself as “I” (ich) and the impersonal “one” (man), mirroring his internal turmoil regarding identity:
“True,” he said, “in town one can very easily manage to go without what isn’t good for one. If one does not do without it, then one has only oneself to blame for the bad consequences. One will be sorry and in this way come to see for the first time really clearly how to manage the next time.”2
Raban’s musings underscore a fundamental motif in Kafka’s oeuvre: the estrangement of the individual from society, from themselves, and the dissociation from their own body: “I don’t even need to go to the country myself, it isn’t necessary. I’ll send my clothed body.”3
However, the most remarkable incident in Raban’s journey occurs not in the physical realm but in the recesses of his mind. In an episode that eerily presages Gregor Samsa’s fate, Raban fantasises about transforming into a beetle:
The form of a large beetle, yes. Then I would pretend it was a matter of hibernating, and I would press my little legs to my bulging belly. And I would whisper a few words, instructions to my sad body, which stands close beside me, bent. Soon I shall have done—it bows, it goes swiftly, and it will manage everything efficiently while I rest.4
This grotesque daydream, quickly abandoned as Raban is forced to confront the demands of his journey, highlights Kafka’s fascination with animalistic transformation as a profound manifestation of depersonalisation and derealisation, serving as a defence mechanism against feelings of powerlessness. This strategy also involves separating the individual from familial ties and the wider societal fabric. However, Kafka doesn’t delve deeper into this theme at this juncture. These nascent images, including the concerns about time and the presence of commercial travellers on a train, will later be further developed in “The Metamorphosis,” through the uncanny misadventure of Gregor Samsa.
This self-fragmentation extends further, beyond Raban’s internal dialogue, trapped between his obligations and his wishes, his immobility and his urge to flee. The very narrative, too, is fragmented: it jumps, it skips, it loses pages. It’s full of holes and interruptions, full of strangers and fleeting episodes. Raban meets a slumbering shopwoman, a young newlywed couple, an old man babbling about the weather, a traveller obsessed with the price of thread—“Sir, you know just as well as I do, these manufacturers send their travellers around the most godforsaken little villages, they go crawling to the seediest of little shopkeepers...”5 The reader is absorbed in Raban’s perspective, sharing his sensory overload, anxiety, and disorientation.
Kafka displays minute attention to physical details and gestures, a style he refined through his exhaustive study of Flaubert. Remember how Kafka admitted as much in one of his letters: “For many years [Sentimental Education] has been as dear to me as are only two or three people; whenever and wherever I’ve opened it, it has startled and absorbed me completely, and I’ve always felt like the spiritual son of this author, albeit a weak and awkward one.”6 In the opening chapter of L’Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert masterfully depicts the idyllic atmosphere on the boat where Frédéric Moreau first encounters Madame Arnoux as they journey from Paris to Nogent-sur-Seine, that is, from the city to the countryside. In “Wedding Preparations”, Kafka emulates his mentor but reverses the original image, crafting a detailed scene of a rain-soaked landscape with Eduard Raban also travelling from the city to the country but dreading the encounter with his fiancée.
And on top of Flaubert, Kafka was also quite obsessed with movies (as we saw last time), and his descriptions feel almost Cubist or cinematic—a collage of fragmentary sense impressions that don’t quite cohere into a unified whole. Objects and gestures—head, hands, elbows, knees—are presented in isolation, not yet “knotted together into an unfathomably thick and cohesive carpet”7 as they would be in Kafka’s later works.
Yet, Kafka’s meticulous depiction of busy city streets and the interplay of light and shadow in a rain-soaked station create a vivid visual impression. Occasionally, he uncovers surreal beauty amidst the ordinary, within the minutiae of daily life that frequently eludes our attention, for instance, the almost hyperreal sight of the horses pulling carriages: “Carriages hastened from street to street across the square, the horses’ bodies flew along horizontally as though they were being flung through the air, but the nodding of the head and the neck revealed the rhythm and effort of the movement.”8
But, as Stach points out, in “Wedding Preparations”, Kafka “did away with fantasy-based capriciousness. The inner world of the psyche no longer appears as a realm of unlimited freedom, but rather as a mere projection screen for external stimuli.”9 Instead of the freewheeling surrealism of “Description of a Struggle,” Kafka depicts an inner landscape tyrannised by the logic of the outer world, where “innumerable second-by-second impressions crowd into Raban’s range of vision with sensual precision.”10
So, the intent of “Wedding Preparations” extends beyond thematic consistency—it’s about perception and style. Kafka’s depiction of the city, laden with visual specifics, endeavours to encapsulate the very essence of the scene realistically, in stark contrast to the fantastical elements present in “Description of a Struggle.” However, the synthesis of Flaubertian realism and the fantastic has yet to occur. As Stach points out:
It was not until after his literary “breakthrough” in 1912, in a further step, which resulted in “The Metamorphosis,” that Kafka was able to reintroduce the element of fantasy into this forcedly realistic narration, in part by his sparing use of unreal elements, which thereby gain in significance—as of page two of “The Metamorphosis,” nothing miraculous occurs anymore—and also by means of a trick that was startling at the time (yet today seems classic) to describe the outside world as though it were a projection of the inner world of the protagonist.”11
Significantly, Kafka never completed this narrative despite revisiting it on multiple occasions. This raises a crucial question: Why did Kafka ultimately abandon “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” leaving it unfinished?
Perhaps it was his carelessness or relentless self-criticism, a trait that tormented him until his dying day. As Reiner Stach observes: “Max Brod had the same feeling he often experienced later with the manuscript pages he coaxed out of Kafka’s hands: he could not understand why his gifted friend did not work more regularly and apply himself more seriously.”12
Perhaps Kafka, grappling with his own existential turmoil, couldn’t bear to see Raban reach a conclusion, so he left him in limbo, continually on the verge of his goal, yet never quite arriving. Perhaps he couldn’t face the prospect of that unhappy resolution himself, just like Raban.
Or, perhaps, he sensed that the true breakthrough wasn’t in the resolution but in the unravelling, in the careful unstitching of reality, which would later become his hallmark.
For Kafka’s readers, “Wedding Preparations” is a gift precisely due to its unfinished status. In this rudimentary form, it provides a rare insight into Kafka’s creative process, marking the inception of his mature style. These rain-soaked, anxiety-ridden pages were the crucible where Kafka first gave form to the nameless dread that would resonate throughout his subsequent work, albeit in a more refined guise. Even this early in his literary career, Kafka was already carving out a style that defied neat classification. Yes, he was undoubtedly a product of his time and place, but he was also something more—a writer who transcended the constraints of contemporary literary trends and charted a course uniquely his own.
ComStor, Schocken, pp. 53-54.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 55.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 65.
Felice, 15 Nov. 1912.
Stach, The Early Years, loc. 6914.
Op. cit., p. 57.
Op. cit., loc. 6880.
Ibid., loc. 6886.
Ibid., loc. 6891.
Ibid., loc. 6946.